The old blind king, Dhṛtarāṣtra, so fearfully thin; his wife Gāndhārī, blindfolded since their marriage; the Pāṇḍavas’ mother, Kuntī, widowed now, were walking together toward the Gaṅgā. Behind them was the vast forest where they had spent three years in silent wandering. They sat down to look back at it. An evil wind was shaking the foliage. Then flames leapt above the tops of the trees. Scorching waves licked over them. Shrieks, trumpetings, and howls came from the forest. The animals rushed out of the vegetation to save themselves. They rushed past the three witnesses, who sat motionless, wrapped in clouds of smoke. Dhṛtarāṣtṛa was a pole clad in rags. To each side, as though escorting him, were the two women and beyond them the fire that had reduced majestic trees to ash burned up the grass of the clearing, and their bodies too.
When Vyāsa told Yudhiṣṭhira how his mother, Kuntī, Dhṛtarāṣtra, and Gandhārī had died, the man who was the Law wept like a child. “Oh, Fire, oh. Agni, so it’s not true that you were assuaged that day by the endless arrows Arjuna loosed against his father’s waters while the Forest of Khāṇḍava burned… Oh, Agni, you chose to seize the mother of your benefactor… He who had a hundred sons has seen them all die… He who was once fanned by a hundred palm fronds waved by the beautiful hands of young girls is fanned now by a hundred vultures’ wings… The march of Kāla, of Time, is subtle and hard to understand… We are alive, and yet we are dead.” Then Yudhiṣṭhira looked at Vyāsa to ask him a question, as if behind his pain he sensed a torment at once fiercely intense and ceremonial, a torment for which only the great ṛṣi could offer relief: “There were many sacred fires in that forest… How can it be that Dhṛtarāṣtra and my mother were burned by a wildfire?” Calmly, Vyāsa answered: “It’s true, there were many sacred fires, and Dhṛtarāṣtra tended them. They celebrated their rites with those fires in the most remote part of the forest. Then he decided to abandon them. The brahmans who were with him didn’t check to see that the fires had gone out. They followed the blind king. So the fires spread through the forest. I was told as much by the ascetics who live nearby, on the banks of the Gaṅgā.”
They walked slowly, at a good distance from each other, along the narrow climbing path. To their right, boulders and shale, steep and dazzling. Before them, a barrier of rocks and snow, thrust into an enamel sky. There were six of them plus a dog. Five brothers, their common wife, the dog. The long and lanky Yudhiṣṭhira led the way, followed by the black mongrel that they had found wandering around the western slopes and that had followed them ever since. They called the animal Dharma, because it was always at Yudhiṣṭhira’s feet.
They never spoke and rarely stopped. They had trudged along interminable beaches, then headed for the highest peaks, crossed the Himālaya and the desert that stretches beyond, and now were climbing again toward Mount Meru, which joins the earth to the sky, toward Indra’s paradise. They were wearing faded rags held together with strips of bark. But their steps were warriors’ steps. Their minds met in memory and mourning. They counted the dead of that single family that had fought against itself to the point of extinction. The appalling carnage of Kurukṣetra was the central vortex. It was there that the chains of earlier events converged, from there that the chains of future events emerged. The links were welded together with boons and curses that went far, far back, intertwining with other stories that distracted them as they tried, sometimes in vain, to reconstruct their every twist and turn. “Time! Time!” were the only words that Arjuna answered when Yudhiṣṭhira in a tone of sober acknowledgment told him that everything was over now. “It is time that cooks each creature in its pot,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. And now it was time to leave the world. The others had agreed with a nod of their heads. And as they stubbornly climbed on and up like tiny parasites hugging the world’s back, everything that had happened, the shame and the glory, the rancors and the spells, seemed to level out and break up, blending their colors in one knotted, worn-out drape.
The still beautiful Draupadī brought up the rear. As always she emanated a scent of lotus, mixed with sweat. Every so often she would raise her head and narrow her proud, bright eyes, a delicate embroidery of wrinkles forming on the burnished skin at their corners, to look at the strong shoulders of those five men among whom her body had been equally shared. She dwelled just a little longer on Arjuna, who, with his strange, high cheekbones, still looked like a boy and a foreigner. From the depths of the silence came the roar of a distant stream, hidden in a gorge. The occasional muffled thud. Ice breaking up. No birds in the air here. No animals on their path. No one noticed when Draupadī missed her footing and fell. But the brothers turned together and saw something dark, like a bundle of rags, rolling down through the boulders till it disappeared. They said nothing, gathering around Yudhiṣṭhira. “You know why it happened? Because in her secret heart Draupadī always preferred Arjuna to the rest of us,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. No one answered. They set off again. Every day the sun followed its obsessive course, ever nearer. Sometimes they would be beset by fogs. Then even their feet were lost to them. One by one they fell, even Arjuna. Each time, with a few terse words, Yudhiṣṭhira would explain why. When Bhīma fell, and he was the last, as he lay dying he managed to ask: “Why?” “Because you were too greedy, when you were eating you never asked yourself whether there was enough for others,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. Then he walked on along the path; without turning back. Now there was only the dog behind him.
Yudhiṣṭhira walked on for days and days. When he slept the dog stretched out at his feet. They were only ever apart when they came across running water. Then the dog crouched down in the freezing stream. His dusty coat became shiny and smooth again. As he watched Yudhiṣṭhira on the bank, his tongue hung down from happiness.
Yudhiṣṭhira had always hoped that the Law would not be suffocated by life’s tumultuousness. Now that all the others had fallen, the Law shone within him like a crystal, but it had nothing in which to be reflected. The mountains don’t ask anyone to defend the dharma. They have no need of it. Yudhiṣṭhira’s Law had survived, the only living being in an immense void. No voice could ever answer him again, save the dog’s timid bark. When Yudhiṣṭhira had called it Dharma, he never thought that one day he would find himself conversing with the animal as though with himself.
As he went on climbing, Yudhiṣṭhira noticed that from a certain point upward there was an alteration in the air’s transparency: beyond that invisible barrier, the very rocks, snows, and those unlikely plants that still grew at this height took on a different consistency, a graphic presence they had never had anywhere else.
Yudhiṣṭhira was curious to see how the air would part at that point. But he wasn’t able to. As soon as he got there, Indra’s resplendent chariot descended on him with a sudden boom. “Welcome to my heaven, Yudhiṣṭhira. You are about to enter with your body.” “All the others have fallen, my brothers and Draupadī. Without them I have no desire for heaven,” said Yudhiṣṭhira, his voice distant and weary. “You will find them again here,” said Indra, with hurried cordiality. “They got here before you.” “But they are not here with their bodies,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. “So it is decreed,” said Indra, suddenly serious. “But you can ascend with your body.”